I have difficulty thinking of the HD consoles (and the Wii) as "retro", but I feel like we're fast approaching the time where these devices have the requisite nostalgia value needed to be considered thus.
I've been playing a bit of Test Drive Unlimited for the last couple of days, because I felt like a nice summery driving game, and that game most definitely qualifies. I was a little surprised to note that it carries a copyright date of 2006, which is fourteen years ago.
Of course, there are plenty of ways in which that game looks a bit dated — most notably the character models… and the fact that the online servers haven't been… err… online for the last eight years — but I'm having a lot of fun playing it, and having a hard time thinking of it as an "old game".
And yet, it's three years older than the Western release of Mana Khemia 2, which I'm currently playing through for the Atelier MegaFeature on MoeGamer. PlayStation 2 is, I think most people would agree, definitely retro — and so going purely on "time" alone, Xbox 360 must surely be thus, too.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter, of course. It's just an interesting thing to ponder. People getting nostalgic for the first generation of HD consoles in the same way that us slightly older folk are nostalgic for 8- and 16-bit pixel art feels like a bit of a milestone for gaming.
If nothing else, it does mean that Xbox 360 and PS3 games are absolutely cheap as chips right now, so if you haven't been down to your local used game emporium lately, I can highly recommend going down there with a big bag to pick up all of those games you didn't want to spend £40 on fifteen years ago… because most of them are now between 50p and £3. That's certainly what I'm going to be doing to celebrate this month's payday!
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